<div dir="ltr">Last week's Science reports on studies which induced mice to act as if they were hallucinating a sound.<div><br></div><div><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33</a><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">The ability to detect external stimuli rapidly and accurately by building internal sensory representations is a central computation of the brain that is critical to guide behavior. Such expectations (or priors) may be acquired throughout the lifetime of an individual and are important to influence perception, particularly when incoming sensory signals are ambiguous (</span><a id="gmail-xref-ref-1-1" class="gmail-xref-bibr" href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-1" style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(55,88,138);text-decoration-line:none;font-weight:700;font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><em style="box-sizing:inherit">1</em></a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">). But this process is not exempt from failure. Hallucinations (perceptual experiences without external stimuli) seen in conditions such as schizophrenia are thought to result from giving too much weight to priors, creating an imbalance at the expense of actual sensory evidence (</span><a id="gmail-xref-ref-2-1" class="gmail-xref-bibr" href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-2" style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(55,88,138);text-decoration-line:none;font-weight:700;font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><em style="box-sizing:inherit">2</em></a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">, </span><a id="gmail-xref-ref-3-1" class="gmail-xref-bibr" href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-3" style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(55,88,138);text-decoration-line:none;font-weight:700;font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><em style="box-sizing:inherit">3</em></a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">). Sustained high-dopamine tone in the striatum has been proposed to contribute to this imbalance (</span><a id="gmail-xref-ref-4-1" class="gmail-xref-bibr" href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-4" style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(55,88,138);text-decoration-line:none;font-weight:700;font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><em style="box-sizing:inherit">4</em></a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">); however, it has remained unclear how the dopaminergic perturbation leads to the generation of hallucinations. On page 51 of this issue, Schmack </span><em style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">et al.</em><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"> (</span><a id="gmail-xref-ref-5-1" class="gmail-xref-bibr" href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-5" style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(55,88,138);text-decoration-line:none;font-weight:700;font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><em style="box-sizing:inherit">5</em></a><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">) uncover the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie dopamine-dependent auditory hallucinatory states, with therapeutic implications.</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740?ijkey=dc959050f9aca2a9b59af202ba146edea5fc22c7&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740?ijkey=dc959050f9aca2a9b59af202ba146edea5fc22c7&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha</a></div><h2 style="box-sizing:inherit;line-height:1.2;font-size:1.5rem;font-family:"Roboto Condensed","Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><span style="font-size:1.1875rem;font-weight:normal"><br></span></h2><h2 style="box-sizing:inherit;line-height:1.2;font-size:1.5rem;font-family:"Roboto Condensed","Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><span style="font-size:1.1875rem;font-weight:normal">INTRODUCTION</span><br></h2><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:16px">Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia impose enormous human, social, and economic burdens. The prognosis of psychotic disorders has not substantially improved over the past decades because our understanding of the underlying neurobiology has remained stagnant. Indeed, the subjective nature of hallucinations, a defining symptom of psychosis, presents an enduring challenge for their rigorous study in humans and translation to preclinical animal models. Here, we developed a cross-species computational psychiatry approach to directly relate human and rodent behavior and used this approach to study the neural basis of hallucination-like perception in mice.</span> </blockquote><div><br></div><div> -- rec --</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 4:07 PM Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
Marcus -<u></u><u></u>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<p>I think the least plausible of these is the
think-yourself-happy approach. If it always worked, that
would be Free Will. Mind over matter.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
This is quite familiar to my own operational logic. I tend toward
trick-yourself-happy with things like "I can always procrastinate
later" to break a procrastination rut for example. I'm
experimenting (without any controls or even a plan) on my
(struggling) 26 year old nephew by offering him a series of
"trick-yourself-out-of-unhappy-or-inaction" tricks that I have
gathered (by bouncing through a life). So far, his resistance (my
Sister's family's classic I-cant-because) has held firm, but I trust
some of the seeds of my cult-deprogramming are getting through even
if they haven't sprouted yet. I follow what I take to be a
stylization of Glen's (likely?) prescription which is to change my
habits and my internal state will follow (with some exponential
moving average?). A friend used to call this "acting as if".<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<p><u></u><u></u>I don’t see machines all the way down and
panconsciousness at odds. Open source software.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>I suppose the question begged by ORCH-AR (Penrose-Hameroff) and
Poised Realm (Kauffman) or Neuronal Superposition (Pearce
hisself) and others is whether "all the way down is qualitatively
different for sufficiently large values of 'down' ? " at which
point something magical/mystical/mythical happens and "viola!"
Consciousness!<br>
</p>
<p>And you are probably much better able to explain why a "quantum
machine" is qualitatively different (or not) than a classical
machine?</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
</div>
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